Music: Fiddles in the Family

Fiddles
in the Family

Text and Photos:
Fradley Garner

Tis God gives
skill,

But not without men's
hands:

He could not make

Antonio Stradivari's
violins

without Antonio.

-George
Eliot

(Marian
Evans Cross)

Antonius
Stradiuarius Cremonenus Faciebat Anno 1722 declares the label from the murky depths of my dear old
violin. And peering through the sound hole at the Italian master's latinized
name 40-odd years ago, I was ready to believe it. All I knew then was that the
fiddle came from the attic of old family friends in New Jersey, who gave it to
me when I was growing up in Newark.

Mads Hjorth, a young violinmaker in Copenhagen, admits to
puncturing the romantic dreams of apprentices bent on becoming Stradivari's
successor at his shop. Mads might not have burst the bubble for me a few
summers ago, when I brought the instrument to Emil Hjorth & Sønner for repairs,
if I hadn't asked him to look through the f-hole at the “Stradiuarius” label
inside.

Mads glanced and smiled. He had already looked at the
violin. “Two or three people come in here every day with a ‘Strad’ to show us,”
he said. “I'd say this one was made in Germany. About, oh, 70 years ago.”
Stradivari lived in Cremona, Italy, where he made his last violin and died at
age 93 in 1737.

This April, Arne Hjorth turns 70 and steps out after 55
years at the luthier's bench. (He's taking it home with him.) His son Mads, 32,
takes control of what he says is the world's oldest house of bowed instrument
makers “which has gone from father to son so long.” Only one more general
family enterprise, W.E. Hill & Sons of Buckinghamshire, England, is older.

The Danish dynasty traces its roots to the year of the
French Revolution, 1789, when Mads’ great-great-great grandfather, Andreas
Hansen Hjorth, moved to Copenhagen from his native Haderslev near the German
border, in South Jutland. “He came to the Country with a heavy Pine TraveI
Chest, now in Arne Hjorth's Possession,” wrote literary historian Jacob
Paludan, “and he looked in high Measure as if he had come to stay.”

In short order this “Finisher of Stringed Instruments”
became sole supplier to the Royal Opera Orchestra. Later he could add the coveted
“Purveyor to the Royal Court” to his sign. Today there’s no violin-playing
Danish royalty to purvey to, but bowed instruments created by this man's heirs
are played in all the major orchestras of Denmark and in some of the great
symphony orchestras of the world.

The owner of a real 1730 Stradivari has called the violin “that
rare mixture, the synthesis of emotion and intellect, of passion and science.”
No other instrument enjoys such universal appeal. Poets limn its charms. Scientists
probe its every part, trying to explain its secrets and improve it. Collectors
hoard it like a rare painting. Investors buy it to sell. Thieves steal and keep
it. Musicians treat it with more tender loving care than many do their own
children. In the hands of a concert virtuoso and many a street fiddler, a
violin can spin a heady spell.

This child of Italy was conceived, some believe, by one
parent during the Italian Renaissance, and it has changed hardly at all down
the centuries. Was Andrea Amati (c. 1510-1580) the papa? Like Andreas Hjorth,
he sparked a family calling. Amati also generated the Cremona genus of violinmakers
that reached peak blossom in the velvety, mellow creations of Stradivari—Nicolo
Amati's pupil and the Rafael of his art—and of Giuseppe Guarneri, eminent son
of yet another dynasty, during the next century and a half. Craftsmen elsewhere
followed the Cremonese prototypes; a few, especially in France and the Tyrol,
distinguished themselves before the demand for violins outran the supply and
the makers began to work faster.

Born in 1752, when Stradivari's own sons were producing fine
instruments, Andreas Hjorth was influenced by the Mittenwald School in South
Germany, harking back to the high center curvature and narrow margins of Nicolo
Amati's graceful designs. The Dane, whose last name means “crown stag,” may
have learned his craft on the road in Germany. When he opened shop in
Copenhagen in those days of smelly streets and no house numbers, Hjorth’s sign
marked his premises, first in Academigade (now Fredericiagade) and later in seven
successive locations in the center of the rampart-and-moat-protected fortress
capital.

Andreas’ heirs were more prone to stay put. After the
82-year-old patriarch died in 1834, string players have brought their precious
charges to only four addresses—since 1964 to the canal front corner of Ny
Vestergade and Frederiksholms Kanal, across the street from the National
Museum. Arne Hjorth finds the secluded layout with a small warehouse across the
cobblestone courtyard “roomier and quieter than what we had on Strøget,” the
pedestrian mall where the shop had done business since 1853.

If
Andreas were to walk into the workshop today, he would not feel out of his
world. The violins and violas in various states of repair on benches and walls
and the cellos standing on the floor look the way the whole string family has
looked for three centuries. The frames and a good many of the tools hung neatly
on the walls haven't changed that much either, though great-great-grandson Arne
(“Senior” they call him and he indentifies himself this way on the phone) has
said that nowadays “all the finest measuring tools we have in Copenhagen are
made in Norway.”

Andreas might be pleased to see one of his own creations
with the initials AHH branded inside. No removable maker’s labels for him or
his tribe! He'd want to examine some prime Hjorth instruments from the later
19th and 20th centuries, too. Andreas may have known that his son Johannes built
more business than violins. Grandson Emil, however, had it in his fingers and
won the firm he named after himself international fame for his violins’ rare,
sweet tone. But the memory of Emil's sons Otto and Knud, who died in 1950 and
1952, burns brightest in the hearts of old clients. The brothers’ creations reflect
the French influence, again looking back to the elegant curvilinear models of
Guarneri and Stradivari.

Stradivari, they say, could build a violin in a week. Two or
three weeks is more like it today, although the larger viola takes longer, and
the cello twice as long. A string bass is such a big unprofitable job that the firm
has made only two in the last 126 years. But there’s no lack of wood out in the
warehouse. “We still have wood from 1850,” says Mads, adding that earlier
generations “all have bought wood” mainly in Germany and Switzerland: curly
maple for the violin's back, sides and scroll; resonant pine for the “table” or
top plate.

The only tree that's good for bowmaking, an art unto itself,
is the phernambuko. The tree grows in Brazil. Blocks of it are curing on the
shelves. Fritz Holmberg, a former cabinetmaker and relative newcomer to the
firm, has a back-room bench of his own where he repairs and rehairs bows all
day. “Fiberglass may come one day,” says the bearded artisan, “but not as a
replacement for good wood—only as a substitute in the cheaper bows.”

Once made, the so-called “white” instrument has to dry
awhile before varnishing. Violins built in the fifties are still hanging in the
back of the shop. That's far more time than usually allowed for mellowing. The
coats of varnish it gets and the climate the finished product dries in can make
the difference between a fine fiddle and a masterwork. Stradivari's radiant
creations are a flaming red-brown today. They seem to change color as the light
plays over them. Still emulating the methods of the l8th-century Cremonese,
many modern luthiers mix and apply their varnishes with the care of classical painters.
Some do it in a warm, dry climate, gradually exposing the instrument to light
and not rushing the process. Senior recalls his father Knud hanging freshly
varnished violins on lines to dry in a netted cage in his own backyard near
Copenhagen.

Andreas might want to know that since 1914, when records
have been preserved, his heirs have fashioned some 500 instruments. But while
hundreds have been repaired and restored in recent years, not one has been
built by a Hjorth since 1969. The sad fact of the matter is that it does not
pay, fast enough anyway. There are too many interruptions. There is too much
repair work, which does pay. There are existing instruments and bows and
accessories by many makers to trade, which pays best of all. And in the highest
taxed country in the world, the cost of running a business behind
Christiansborg Palace and paying a staff of seven means business or else.

Senior has traveled often around Scandinavia and elsewhere, buying
stringed instruments, including Hjorth violins. Too often, especially in
France, he’s found other labels glued over the Hjorth brand. Violinmaking, like
all forms of art, has always been plagued by fakers and thieves. For as Senior
has noted, “The really good instruments never decline in value. They just grow
more and more precious with time.”

Mads might astound his ancestor, as he recently did this amateur,
with the information that a good fiddle picked up for $50 about 50 years ago
could command $5,000-$6,000 today. A nice $10 bow then might go for $3,000.
Last year, the Ex. Hubermann Stradivari was auctioned in London for £159,500.
By comparison, a good average violin at the Hjorth shop these days costs about
$400. That kind of money plays better for most beginners. Connoisseurs may find
an Antonius Gragnani violin from 1774, a Francois Lupot from 1778, and other
rare old instruments.

Father and son agree, however, that the age of a violin or
another stringed instrument, even if it’s centuries old, doesn't really matter.
What's important, they insist, is that it be well built and played on. “It’s as
if the small particles in its material really swing into place in time,” Senior
has explained. And the craftsmen of Italy, France, Germany and England, where
most single-maker violins originate today, would likely agree.

Look for an exasperated headshake from the followers of
Carleen Maley Hutchins, an acoustics researcher and central force among
violinmakers in the United States. In a landmark article in Scientific American, Mrs. Hutchins
accused Stradivari's and Guarneri's successors of forming “a cult that has been
plagued with more peculiar notions and pseudo science than even medicine.”
Members of her Catgut Acoustical Society include physicists, engineers,
chemists and musicians. They’re certain that science can pinpoint every nuance
of a Strad’s or any other instrument's performance, and light the way to
building even better ones. One member, Richard E. Menzel of Livingston, New Jersey,
has an acoustics laboratory in his violin workshop. “I doubt if it does an
instrument any good to play on it,” the former director of operations for
Lockheed told me last summer.

Mrs. Hutchins defines the violin as “a set of strings
mounted on a wooden box containing an almost closed air space.” To a European
violinmaker, this is like calling sculpture “art you can walk around.” Arne
Hjorth has pointed out that making a violin is very different from building a
piece of furniture. A fine instrument, he says, must be made by one person,
uninterrupted. And fashioned from the inside out. “One starts, so to speak,
with the tone, and then builds it into an expensive shell.” Too many
distractions and the maker ends up with an entirely different instrument than
the one he had in mind. “It's like writing a letter. If you are interrupted,
you lose the thread.”

Such talk, like references to “the mysterious inner life” of
the great violins, falls like sour notes on empirical scientific ears. And the
technological approach just amuses and saddens the old-world violinmakers. “You
cannot measure beauty,” Senior told me with a knowing smile, adding that the
scientific tools of his craft go all the way back to Galileo, who profoundly
influenced the masters of Cremona a century later. But there can never be a
formula for instrument making, he insists. No factory fiddle ever will match a
one-maker masterwork. “The alpha and omega in this trade,” the Dane has said
elsewhere, “is a feel for materials. And concentration!” His son, who learned
the trade in the workshops of old-school French masters for three years and
under his father for another two, is of the same mind. “The feeling for
materials lies in the fingers,” says Mads. Every 10 fingers are unique and “no
two pieces of wood are alike.”

On one point the two schools agree: If more young people
don't go into violinmaking, future generations may have nothing left to argue
about. The Hjorth shop no longer accepts first-year apprentices. Some places
abroad still do, and there are a few schools for luthiers in southern Europe,
but their enrollments are tightly limited.

Now that he's turning the business over to his son, Arne
Hjorth plans to take home and varnish the 20 or so new “white” instruments
hanging in the shop. “I've mixed a lacquer I think is right,” he told me. “It contains
propelis, which is like bee's wax. Will it hold its color? I think so.”

Will the Hjorth dynasty survive into the 21st century?
Senior is less sure about that. For one long-range reason, his only son has two
young daughters but no son of his own to hand the business on to. Youth is on
his side. There is also the example of Europe's oldest monarchy. In Denmark,
the King's daughter seems to have matters very well in hand.

Fradley
Garner, a frequent contributor to Scanorama, plays first violin in The Hamlet Strings
in Denmark.